Reading The Book

I have started learning Rust from The Book, currently I am reading The Slice Type. For some reason ownership did not look confusing to me, but references & borrowing did.

I learn a programming language by doing a lot of exercises. I will soon put a repo in Codeberg, where I will upload my Rust learnings. The Rust book seems to be a book written for people who already know other programming languages. I don’t think you should write a programming language book like that. It should be a book where anybody can pick it up — in plain natural language — and be able to understand it. If the Rust community doesn’t do it, I think a lot of people are going to avoid Rust. It’s the same with Clojure. Clojure has been dominated by people who are really experienced in the industry, and they don’t even bother about people who are starting with Clojure as their first programming language.

In fact, it’s the people who are already familiar with other programming languages that are the ones who are going to start with Clojure. I have never seen a total noob to programming pick up Clojure. Somehow the Clojure community seems to have turned a blind eye to this huge problem. They are happy the way they are.

Even though you have AI, you do need muscle memory to write good code. Or at least in today’s case, to check for improvements that could be made by A.I., and to find corrections in it without much effort. Mastery is very important.

Should I vlog or blog about Rust? I don’t know. I don’t have the bandwidth. I already have a channel called Clojure Diary where I vlog about Clojure. That was because I couldn’t find sufficient material that would help a beginner learn Clojure. I also write a book on Clojure, for almost the same reason. There aren’t many libre books on Clojure. Maybe the community is very small, so there aren’t many who will talk and write about it. This could be the result of the community never trying to promote Clojure as a beginner-friendly first programming language that one can learn.

Don’t Have Expectations

I want to tell the reader of this blog: please don’t have expectations. This is a highly ignorant guy, who is passionate, maybe foolhardy, and for some reason thinks he can host Clojure on top of Rust. It might never happen. At most, I think I can write a Lisp interpreter in Rust. Right now I have no idea how to create a compiler for Lisp using Rust. Compiling stuff to machine code, I feel is far difficult than interpreting stuff.

I do know that Build Your Own Lisp might be helpful. Right now I want to learn Rust, then use this book to build Lisp with Rust.

I’m determined to put just another foot forward, and I am dedicated enough to tell the world what step I have taken — that’s about it for now.